Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi

This paper reframes post-apartheid everyday life against the backdrop of the spectacles of promise and disappointment that have characterized South African public culture in the transitional and post-transitional periods. Inspired by recent work in the field of affect theory that reads negative affect as a potential political resource, I consider iconographies of struggle and difficult emotions in an effort to study disappointment as a form of politics. I suggest that works of quotidian esthetic mediation such as the video installations “Black Smoke Rising” by Berni Searle and “what don’t you see when you look at me?” by Zanele Muholi might help to recast disappointment as a resistant political emotion that disrupts the fantasies upheld by the spectacle of the unfulfilled promise.